How can you validate your site for cross browser issues within 10 minutes
Interview with Slavy Slavov, cofounder of Equafy
What is your startup?
Equafy is a centralized cross browser testing tool delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS).
What does it do?
Equafy SaaS cloud-based solution can test any website on numerous Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari versions for visual bugs and individual page issues. The affordable and user-friendly service suitable for web developers, testers and website owners to validate their work before they launch their sites – can save users time, license and infrastructure costs in three simple steps.
Through our website, users begin the process by entering a specific scenario, listing a particular web site to be tested or define specific user actions. Finally all steps will be tested across any selected browser, screen size and platform.
Results of individual pages and steps are then displayed through the service’s dashboard where users can see page differences, missing elements, and layout of the site’s design.
Who is your startup aimed at?
Our startup can help practically every web developer, qa and website owner to have a better site. People using design agencies to develop their site can also control their work very easy with our service. Since we are SaaS we do it globally and people from all countries value from it.
How does your startup stand out against its competitors?
Our service is going beyond what is offered by other testing tools on the market by creating a simple and centralized verification platform that can analyze sites with dynamic content, changed when the page is refreshed, containing rotating images, products, and even advertisements. To complement our testing tool, we’ve developed an intuitive results page where users can actually see the differences and faults of their sites as detected by the Equafy system, allowing them to take quick and effective steps to rectify any issue.
Why did you start this product?
We’ve been there, done that for a long time. Never could find the right product to help us with our cross-browser testing. This is the challenges we’ve been facing for years:
- Fragile automation: Nobody wants to maintain 1000 test scripts for each build. It just doesn’t make sense and defeat the purpose. Nobody wants to spend 2 hours investigating a failed test to find out that you’re having a timing issue due to the environment. That’s not what testing is about.
- Infrastructure investment: We want to invest time testing our website, not building a costly infrastructure to support our automation. We care about testing, not hardware.
- Crazy test matrix: Browsers version, desktop and mobile operating systems (Android anyone?), devices form factors, dynamic websites changing 10 times a day … Ring a bell?
So one day we decided to truly do something about it to fix the problem once and for all!
We did not want to build a startup with army of people. We wanted startup that can serve millions people with 10-15 people team for several years. Being based in Bulgaria is in some aspects a great advantage for startups. It is part of the EU, very close to big hubs like London, Berlin and most importantly full with great specialists on the market. For reference – during the last year Google Code Jam contest 16 out of 24 finalists were from central and eastern Europe. Doing a high tech product with balanced cost is one of the advantages doing it from Bulgaria.
What has been your greatest achievement so far?
We are really proud that we developed the service in a really scalable way. Having worked in enterprise as well we knew the cost of big changes. Many startups make it quick and dirty since they don’t know their market well enough and want to test it. We took different approach, we designed it to scale for millions users from start. That way when we need to make bigger changes they are taking us less than a day for most. For example we are very flexible with the cloud solutions, if one cloud provider is down we can move to another very quickly.
In the coming year, what would you like to achieve with your business?
As immediate priority we target to add 3 new features – mobile browsers, the automatic bug detection and support for MacOS. We’d also like to expand our customer base. We support the open source communities giving them free access to our solution.
Does your website look the same on all browsers and screen sizes?
Check right now…
